Monsignor Ferretti

The Weight of New Titles, 1995 – 2001

The appointment as Monsignor arrived while I was in the middle of a faculty meeting, which seemed appropriate. The things that change your life permanently often arrive in undignified moments.

I did not particularly want the title. I want to be honest about that, because I think the convention of performing reluctance about ecclesiastical advancement while clearly being satisfied by it is a form of dishonesty I have always found distasteful. My reluctance was real. The title brought with it an increase in administrative responsibility and a decrease in direct pastoral contact, which is precisely the inverse of what I would have chosen.

I told Emmanuel about it over coffee. He listened to my reservations with the expression he wears when he has already reached his own conclusion and is waiting for you to reach the same one.

Emmanuel: “You know what this means.”

“That I now have less time for the people and more time for the people who manage the people.”

Emmanuel: “Yes. And you also have more access to the structures that affect those people’s lives. You can push the door from the outside or from the inside. You have just been handed a key.”

It was a more useful frame. I tried to carry it.

The bureaucratic machinery encountered from the inside is both more understandable and more frustrating than it appears from the outside. More understandable because you can see why each procedure exists, why each form was created, what problem it was designed to solve. More frustrating because the distance between the procedure’s purpose and its actual effect has, in most cases, grown very large over the years, and the institution’s natural conservatism makes that distance difficult to close.

I spent considerable energy during these years trying to reduce the friction between the machinery and the people it was supposed to serve. I was partly successful. The machinery is very large, and my success was proportionally small. I do not say this with despair. I say it because it is true, and because the temptation to either catastrophize the institution’s failures or minimize them is equally unhelpful.

The Church is a human institution carrying a divine mandate. These two facts exist simultaneously and in tension. The tension is not a problem to be solved. It is the condition of the work.

• • •

The hardest case I shepherded during these years I cannot describe in detail, even now, even with enough time elapsed to have blurred the identifying features. I will say only that it involved a priest — a man I had known since the seminary, a man of genuine gifts and genuine weakness — who fell in a way that had consequences for people in his care.

What I had to navigate was the gap between two legitimate claims: the claim of justice, which required accountability and transparency, and the claim of mercy, which required that the man in collapse be treated as a human being capable of repentance and reconstruction rather than merely as a liability to be managed.

I do not think I got it right. I think I got it less wrong than I might have, which is what I mean when I say that I am grateful for the slowly accumulated wisdom of pastoral experience. But I did not get it right. The people who were hurt needed more than what was offered. The priest received more protection than the situation warranted. This is a truth about that era of the Church that cannot be softened, and I do not intend to soften it.

What I can say is that the experience marked me permanently. Whatever residual institutional loyalty I carried as a kind of default posture was, in those years, replaced by something more active: a deliberate commitment to the priority of the vulnerable over the institutional, which I have tried to maintain against considerable pressure ever since.

Grace arrived anyway. It usually does, though not always in the forms or timeframes we would choose.